Over the winter, West Park lake attracts twenty or so tufted ducks each year. Come the spring, most of them are off. Sometimes a few still hang around. This year, there seem to be two pairs. This is one of them. The drake, black and white, was asleep on the water, but still had an eye open watching out for danger. The black and brown female was swimming nearby.
The Barley Field in the Smestow Valley Nature Reserve has been developed as a wildflower meadow. With the cold and damp weather this spring, there hasn’t been much of a show of wildflowers.
The blackthorn hedge around the field has put on its usual display, visible in one of these shots. Then, late last month, cowslips started flowering.
The day after the West Park coot chicks had hatched, so I went back to see if they were out swimming yet. They weren’t. They were getting lots of parental attention. One parent was on the nest, seemingly feeding them continuously. The other parent was constantly swimming from the nest; diving for food; then swimming back, climbing on the nest, and passing the food to the other parent.
Golden netted iris in a front garden. There had been a few days with blustery breezes, but the flowers weren’t showing signs of any ill effects that I could see.
I’d been away for ten minutes or so, looking at the goslings (yesterday’s post). But I’m told that the West Park turtle emerged during a much shorter period when no-one was watching. One minute it wasn’t there. A minute later, literally, and it was.
When it emerged, it was wet and glistening all over. These pictures cover a span of eight minutes. It looked completely dry by the end of the sequence.
The turtle was at its favourite sunbathing spot. One of the pictures shows just how near that spot is to the nest which had the newly hatched coot chicks. For once, the turtle was facing towards the nest, and seemed to be watching it all the time we were here.
A lone lady’s smock flowering, half-hidden in long grass. Actually, there were a few others, none very close together, in the same patch of long grass.
